An Online Retailer Walked Into a Salad Bar

When Amazon announced on Friday that it would buy the grocery retailer Whole Foods for more than $13 billion, the news that one business behemoth would be swallowing another was too juicy for the armchair comics of Twitter and Facebook to let pass without comment.

It is the custom of internet life in the 21st century to compete for likes, shares and retweets with wry or snarky comments on the news.

Amazon’s latest acquisition was no exception.

Whole Foods has long been a punch line for people uncomfortable with everything the organic retailer represents. A bourgeois supermarket that caters to people for whom good old Tropicana orange juice just isn’t good enough, not when there’s juice that’s been squeezed by hand from organic oranges plucked from a sun-dappled field by magical unicorns who are raised in only the most humane ways. What’s an extra few dollars when you’re rushing off to yoga?

And Amazon, along with its founder, chairman and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, has been developing a reputation as a benevolent ruler of modern mass consumption.

The online retailer has succeeded by being an extremely convenient way to buy nearly anything and have it delivered with startling speed, even though there might be a little discomfort about the carbon footprint and the closing of beloved bookshops. But at least, customers could rationalize that. Mr. Bezos was using his fortune to pay for great journalism at The Washington Post, along with some charitable work. And fans of innovation do seem to enjoy his company’s experiments with talking cylinders for the home and drone deliveries.

But underneath all that there are hints of a darker narrative, one where employees face grim pressures.

It’s a bit like Loki and Deadpool going into the avocado business. It’s just the sort of dystopian comedy the internet loves on a Friday. The comments generally fell into four groups.

Whole Foods is expensive

“For that price, what’d they get? Two bags of granola?,” wrote Kevin Ridder on Facebook under The New York Times’s report of the sale.

“I too have spent $13.7 billion at Whole Foods Market but somehow I only have a half used container of Almond Milk to show for it,” wrote Penton Tabitha on Facebook.